Billionaires' Ball

Gluttony and Hubris in an Age of Epic Inequality

The concentration of wealth today in such a small number of hands inevitably created a dynamic that led to freewheeling financial speculation a dynamic that produced similarly disastrous results in the last great age of inequality, in the 1920s. Such concentrated economic power reverberates throughout society, threatening the quality of life and the very functioning of democracy. As McQuaig and Brooks illustrate, it’s no accident that the United States claims the most billionaires but suffers from among the highest rates of infant mortality and crime, the shortest life expectancy, and the lowest rates of social mobility and electoral political participation in the developed world.

In Billionaires’ Ball, McQuaig and Brooks take us back in history to the political decisions that helped birth our billionaires, then move us forward to the cutting-edge research into the dangers that concentrated wealth poses. Via vivid profiles of billionaires ranging from philanthropic capitalists such as Bill Gates to hedge fund king John Paulson and the infamous band of Koch brothers Billionaires’ Ball illustrates why we hold dearly to the belief that they “earned” and “deserve” their grand fortunes, when such wealth is really a by-product of a legal and economic infrastructure that’s become deeply flawed.

“Lively, tough-minded, and impeccably researched, Billionaires’ Ball powerfully demonstrates how ruthless political opportunism—as opposed to talent, hard work, or innovation—is helping the rich get richer. The current system, unjust and socially destructive, McQuaig and Brooks argue, sacrifices the interests of the bottom 99 percent (as the Occupy Wall Street movement has described it) to ensure unprecedented wealth and privilege for the 1 percent at the top.”—Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power and Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children

“In this breezy and lucid tale of the rise, fall, and return of plutocracy in America, Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks make a compelling case for taxes, especially on the inheritance of great fortunes that could renew American society from one generation to the next.”—James K. Galbraith, author of Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis

“A devastating expos‚àöv† of the real-world impact of extreme wealth concentration from two of our most rigorous, knowledgeable and humorous chroniclers of corporate excess. An indispensable read for this political moment.”—Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine

“By profiling members of the upper .01%, [McQuaig and Brooks] colorfully demonstrate the whopping dimensions of inequality, debunking notions that it is economically, politically, or morally justified. A compelling book for all concerned citizens and anyone who wonders if this is the only world possible.”—Robert W. McChesney, co-founder of Free Press and co-author of Dollarocracy: How Billionaires Are Buying Our Democracy and What We Can Do about It

“McQuaig and Brooks give a fascinating account of how many of the country’s super-rich made their fortunes and why they do not deserve them. Billionaires’ Ball will leave readers both better informed and infuriated.”—Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of False Profits

From Chapter 1: “Return of the Plutocrats”

Imagine this: you are given one dollar every second. At that rate, after one minute, you would have sixty dollars. And after twelve days, you would be a millionaire--something beyond most people’s wildest dreams. But how long would it take to become a billionaire? Well, at that rate, it would take almost thirty-two years. Being a billionaire isn’t just beyond most people’s wildest dreams; it’s likely beyond their comprehension. Another way to grasp the sheer size of billionaires’ fortunes is to imagine how long it would take Bill Gates, generally considered the world’s richest man, to count his $53 billion. If he counted it at the same rate--one dollar every second--and he counted nonstop day and night, he’d have it all tallied up in 1,680 years. Still another way to look at it is this: if Bill Gates had started counting his fortune at that rate back in 330 ad--the year that the Roman emperor Constantine had his wife boiled alive and chose Byzantium as the empire’s new capital--he’d just be finishing up now.

After years of basking in the glow of a flattering limelight, by the fall of 2011 the very rich were experiencing something new and altogether jarring: the glare of a harsh spotlight trained directly on them. The temptation to bark orders like: “Dim that light, or else!” was natural enough, but perhaps unwise. After all, those shining the spotlight were not their employees and were swarming in large numbers through the streets of lower Manhattan, behaving like the sort of unruly mob one finds in faraway places where the ways of the free world are insufficiently appreciated. All of a sudden, right here in America, being wondrously, fulsomely, voluptuously rich was no longer a badge of honor, something to announce gleefully to the world by squealing the tires of one’s Lamborghini at pedestrians who were in the way. Wall Street--the nexus of ambition, brains, greed, glamour, the very g-spot of the American Dream--was no longer something to be glorified, but rather occupied. Where would it end? Could the trappings of wealth become a source of embarrassment? Could the day come when a yacht became like a fur coat--one of life’s small pleasures ruined by the prospect that wearing it (or docking it) might attract a crowd of protestors? Imagine a protestor so mean-spirited that she would object to the sight of a banker lounging on a pleasure craft massively larger than the house she had once owned but that now belonged to . . . a bank. Of course, it could be worse. Luckily for the bankers, the occupiers were a little fuzzy in their targeting, going broadly after the top 1 percent, apparently unaware that the real red meat was much higher up the food chain--the top .01 percent, the top .001 percent, or all the way up to the dizzying heights occupied (in this case appropriately so) by billionaires. Anyway, help was on the way. Already, the lobbying industry was swinging into action. By late November 2011, one of the leading Washington lobby firms--Clark, Lytle, Geduldig & Cranford--had prepared a memo for the American Bankers Association (leaked to the press by some mean-spirited soul), which laid out a media strategy for countering the Occupy Wall Street juggernaut. The lobbyists insisted that the answer lay in a carefully pre- pared counter-campaign aimed at slinging mud at the motives of the occupiers: “If we can show they have the same cynical motivation as a political opponent, it will undermine their credibility in a profound way.” (It’s tough to imagine what cynical motivation might lead people to live in water-soaked tents for weeks on end.) The danger was that the anti-Wall Street message, if unchallenged, could turn the big Wall Street banks into fodder for the Democratic po- litical machine--and worse. As the memo noted: “The bigger concern should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companies--and might start running against them too.” The lobbyists even raised the prospect of the Tea Party crowd joining in some kind of a Right-Left populist free-for-all of bank-bashing: “The combination has the potential to be explosive later in the year when media reports cover the next round of bonuses and contrast it with stories of millions of Americans making do with less this holiday season.” (It’s gratifying to see that, even when they’re plotting the destruction of a democratic movement, lobbyists now use inclusive language about the “holiday season.”) All this looming victimization was no doubt baffling to members of the financial elite, who still had trouble grasping the notion that they were somehow supposed to feel culpable for the 2008 financial crash. That bewilderment had been evident as early as January 2009, only months after the crash, at the elite gathering in the Swiss town of Davos, where bankers, business leaders, political shakers, and other big thinkers come together every year to celebrate the globalized world of liberated financial markets, shrunken government, and reinvigorated capitalism. Of course, some bewilderment was inevitable in Davos that year, with even questions popping up about why markets had done such a poor job of policing themselves. The headline on a dispatch that appeared on the website Slate captured the mood: “Davos Man, Confused.” Written by journalist Daniel Gross, the piece explained that, despite the confusion, there was a broad consensus at Davos that “[s]uccess is the work of Great Men and Women, while failure can be pinned on the system.” Or, as another journalist, Julian Glover noted in the UK’s Guardian: “The shock is real, the grief has hardly begun, but no one in Davos seems to think [this] means they should be less important or less rich.” That would have involved a change of mindset, which was not what these economic overlords seemed inclined toward. After all, a key concept behind the economic order of the past few decades has been the central importance of individual talent--and the need to nurture it with abundant financial rewards. That way, so the idea goes, the brilliant in our midst would be lured to the top jobs that run the world. Ensuring the active participation of these giants among us was clearly understood to be worth a lot, and pay scales were adjusted accordingly, going through the roof at the upper end. Just because the global economy was now in a free fall hardly seemed like grounds to beat up the very people who’d played key roles in designing it. So, in Manhattan, then-CEO of Merrill Lynch John Thain apparently saw no irony as he explained why he’d felt it necessary to pay $4 billion in executive bonuses to keep the “best” people on staff--right after those same overachievers had steered the company to a stagger- ing net loss of $27 billion and, in the process, helped trigger the global economic meltdown. The decision of the Wall Street crowd to collectively pay themselves a record $140 billion in 2009--outstripping even their 2007 record--may have seemed odd under the circumstances, but then no one ever accused Wall Street bankers of being unduly modest, unassuming, or prone to self-doubt. Away from the rarified air of Davos and Manhattan, doubts were beginning to appear. Some less-gifted types were now clamoring for change, even suggesting that cutting executive pay might induce the hypertalented to seek more socially useful employment in areas like teaching or health care. But a letter to the New York Times clarified the danger of this approach, making a compelling case for maintaining extravagant pay, even huge executive bonuses: “Without them, Wall Streeters will all look for other jobs. Do we really want these greedy, incompetent clowns building our houses, teaching our children or driv- ing our cabs”

As a result of the dramatic increase in the concentration of income and wealth at the top during the last few decades, the United States has become an extremely unequal society. Before going any farther, we should point out that we are not against all inequality. On the contrary, some reasonable degree of inequality is not only acceptable and inevitable but even desirable because it allows for different rewards for different levels of individual effort and contribution. But what exists today in the United States--and to a lesser extent in Britain and Canada--is a level of inequality that is extreme compared to the rest of the advanced, industrialized world. Indeed, the level of inequality in the United States today is actually more considerably extreme than what exists in many developing countries, including India, Cambodia, and Nigeria, and even in many Middle Eastern countries, such as Egypt and Tunisia, where excessive inequality is widely believed to have played a role in sparking the Arab spring uprisings of 2009-2010. Over the past three decades, virtually all the growth in American incomes has gone to the top 10 percent, with particularly large gains going to the top 1 percent and spectacularly large gains going to the top .01 percent. Between 1980 and 2008, the incomes of the bottom 90 percent of the population grew by a meager 1 percent, or an average of just $303. Meanwhile, over those same years, the incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans grew by 403 percent, or an average of a massive $21.9 million. The richest 300,000 Americans now enjoy almost as much income as the bottom 150 million. These high rollers make up an enormously rich and powerful class that can best be described as a plutocracy--not unlike the plutocracy of financial interests that dominated America back in the 1920s, when the opulence of the wealthy and their disproportionate influence over the political process was particularly blatant.